As more people end up experiencing homelessness, they’re also facing increasingly punitive and reactionary responses from local governments and their neighbors. Such policies could become legally codified in short order, with the high court having agreed to hear arguments in Grants Pass v. Johnson.
Originally brought in 2018, the case challenged the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, over an ordinance banning camping. Both a federal judge and, later, a panel from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck the law down, saying that Grants Pass did not have enough available shelter to offer homeless people. As such, the law was deemed to be a violation of the Eighth Amendment.
The ruling backed up the Ninth Circuit’s earlier ruling on the Martin v. City of Boise case, which said that punishing or arresting people for camping in public when there are no available shelter beds to take them to instead constituted a violation of the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause in the Eighth Amendment. That applied to localities in the Ninth Circuit’s area of concern and has led to greater legal scrutiny even as cities and counties push for more punitive and restrictive anti-camping laws. In fact, Grants Pass pushed to get the Supreme Court to hear the case, and several nominally liberal cities and states on the West Coast are backing its argument. If the Supreme Court overturns the previous Grants Pass and Boise rulings, it would open the door for cities, states, and counties to essentially criminalize being unhoused on a massive scale.
If only there was a way that didn’t involve involuntarily committing people, whether to jail or a psych hospital…
You left out that mental illness and addiction are both increasingly acknowledged to very often result from the difficulties of coping with garbage social conditions – even at an individual level. What came first, the chicken or the egg?
Some wild experiments have been done out there – mostly in other countries, obv – where it turns out that when you give these deranged people housing, access to education and/or employment, and maybe even healthy social connections, they get a lot less deranged like super fucking quickly. Just wild.
You’re just huffing propaganda.
HF does not make mental illness go away and it does not make substance use go away. When controlled, HF does not lead to a decrease in substance use.
Addicts are getting money for drugs by abusing their communities. People who do crime as a living should not be left on the streets. Mentally ill people unable to meaningfully take care of themselves are no more capable in a building as opposed to outside a building.
Ignoring reality does nothing to further the cause it just elicits push back from everyone who sees the cause associated with delusional clowns.
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